There’s no way to make up for a lost time, no matter how good the content of your lead reply is.
Customers nowadays want instant gratification. “A bit slower than anticipated” is unacceptable. Regarding sales inquiries, 82% of customers expect “immediate” solutions to be significant or highly significant. In the same poll, 62 per cent of consumers described “immediate” in sales as 10 minutes or less.
What exactly is Lead Response Time?
The average time it takes a sales staff person to follow up with a contact is known as a lead, such as downloading information, filling out a form, or returning a phone call, is referred to as lead response time.
How to Determine Lead Response Time
Lead response time is simple to determine.
All you need are three pieces of information.
- the time your leads contacted you,
- the time your staff reacted to them, and
- the overall number of leads.
These will compute the time required to report to that specific lead.
Once you have that figure, add together all the
lead response times and divide it by the number of contacts or leads to get the average lead response time.
The Golden Rule: Respond Within 5 Minutes
Studies show that firms that reply to leads within five minutes or less are 100 times more likely to connect and close deals.
But answering in 5 minutes or less is tricky; you need time to investigate before jumping into a call. What you want is a method that will enable your sales staff to react swiftly to incoming prospects consistently. Here’s how you can achieve this:
Create a System
Creating a consistent method your team can follow for responding to incoming leads can help you reap the advantages immediately.
You may try this method:
- An email is sent out notifying the recipient of a new lead.
- A sales rep is tasked with following up on the prospect.
- A sales rep researches a potential customer.
- A sales rep will contact the individual within five minutes of receiving the lead.
- In the course of a sales call, the salesperson takes notes.
- A sales rep evaluates a potential customer.
- Sales reps set up follow-up appointments if the prospect is a good fit.
Rank Lead in Order of Most Recent.
By prioritising leads who initiated contact first rather than contacting fresh prospects first, sales teams make a typical error. Of course, poor organisation and software faults are frequently to blame, but this results in older leads being pushed to the back of the queue and experiencing extended response times.
By contacting your leads in the order in which they contacted you, you may reduce the time it takes for older leads to get a response while maintaining replies to newer leads within an acceptable time.
Stay on top of your to-do list.
An intimidating task at first, but with the support of management solutions and an executable strategy, increasing your total conversion rate is possible. In addition, improved response times may help you compete and win against your competition at all times.